A Lull in the Game – Southampton Press

East End real estate action slowed but never stopped excerpts from this article below.

“I think we’ll be able to tell more, when the spring season really begins,” said Michael Daly, owner of RE/MAX Beach Properties in Southampton. Although the year-end bonuses of investment bankers, traders and hedge fund employees have directly impacted East End sales for years, Mr. Daly said he is not certain whether this year’s checks are necessarily the trigger that turns around the real estate market.“I think [the turn-around] is primarily due to pent-up demand,” he said. “There are always a lot of people from the New York financial community who are interested in buying.”As of now, sales activity is picking up across the board in all price levels and all areas, Mr. Daly said. People are coming to the conclusion that there wasn’t a “bubble,” and so it hasn’t burst, he explained. “There is a natural ebb and flow to sales.” There will always be the “chicken littles” who see only the negative, he said.However, the one thing that has consistently gone up is the price of a house, Mr. Daly said. In 1997, the median price of a house in Southampton was $200,000; by 2006, it was $760,000. There has been a quadrupling of values in the last nine years, he said.Although the number of high-end houses priced at $10 million or more has soared in the last two years, Mr. Daly said that the market has appreciated pretty consistently across the board—for middle-range homes as much as high-end ones. The difference, he said, rests in the fact that news of a multimillion-dollar house sale travels like “wildfire.”

“There’s a lot of hype in this business. Separating truth from fiction isn’t always easy. Opinions are opinions, but the numbers speak for themselves,” he said during a phone interview last week.

PLUS – see the GREAT MAP of village and hamlet 2006 sales throughout the Hamptons provided on the subscriber site of The Southampton Press